Felix Salmon

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Elizabeth Warren had a conference call with left-wing bloggers this afternoon, just after being introduced to the public by Barack Obama in the White House Rose Garden. She said that she first started talking to Barack Obama about a consumer financial protection agency in December 2006 — before even her Democracy article came out.

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Every six months or so, The Audit, CJR’s financial-journalism blog, holds a breakfast to update interested parties on how the blog is doing. Each breakfast has an invited speaker, and so it was that I found myself at 7:45 this morning in a very posh Upper East Side club, being offered an array of ties to choose from before being allowed upstairs to take my seat between Nicholas Lemann and Victor Navasky.

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It’s weirdly depressing watching everybody scramble around trying to work out what on earth the kindasorta appointment of Elizabeth Warren to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau actually means. As Ryan Chittum notes, the WSJ certainly can’t make up its mind: David Weidner says that Warren is being sidelined and that “someone else will make the final decisions”; the paper’s news story, by contrast, says that she will have broad powers.

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Remember Fannie Mae’s National Housing Survey? Well, Fannie has repeated the exercise, just six months later, and chief economist Doug Duncan tells me it might even become more frequent than that, in future.

I had a fun time last night sparring with Cathleen Rittereiser, who brought along a couple of copies of her new book, “Top Hedge Fund Investors.” (Wiley, $60, but only $37.80 at Amazon.) Her elevator pitch was a good one: a lot of books have been written about top hedge fund managers, but this is the first to be written about the people who actually invest in hedge funds.

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The Chase online-banking fiasco is continuing into this morning, at least according to Twitter chatter. The bank’s website went down on Monday night, was completely offline until Wednesday, and has been unreliable since then. And the response from the bank has been laughable: